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Gin, Tonic and a Dash of Restraint

The gin and tonic from the Todd English Food Hall, with grapefruit, cardamom and a jaunty leaf of basil.Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Sipping a good gin and tonic is like finding a 20th-century oxford shirt in the closet and realizing that you can still wear it downtown tonight without looking out of step with the century we’re stuck in.

It just works.

But that hasn’t stopped mixology-besotted bartenders from trying to make it better. You’ll find a few of them who can’t resist filling a glass with more and more flavor dimensions, creating a gin and tonic that’s such a complicated spectacle, you barely recognize it. The good news, though, is that plenty of fresh and successful variations are being dreamed up by bartenders and restaurateurs who don’t view the word “restraint” as an epithet.

Thanks to them (and to an international boom in new, carefully crafted gins and tonics), this is a fine time to be a G&T drinker. Especially in New York.

“And then you toss Dorothy Parker on top,” I heard a bartender say the other evening at Cata, a Spanish restaurant on the Lower East Side. As much as I loved the image of one of the great wits of the Algonquin Round Table lounging on a bed of ice, the bartender was referring to a brand of gin, one that’s made in Brooklyn and named after someone who knew a little something about the pleasures of distilled spirits.

Photo

Pedro Gonçalves, the beverage director at Oceana making a spicy gin and tonic.Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Cata offers a staggering array of gin and tonics: 25 at last count, although the list keeps growing and evolving. And their inspiration is the vogue for fresh twists on the cocktail in cities like Madrid and Barcelona. You might say the Spanish formula is to maintain the traditional, no-fuss approach (gin and tonic on ice), but to sidestep the usual lime and replace that garnish with new currents of spice and fruit that (ideally) bring out the botanicals in the gin.

For my first try at Cata, the bartender gently muddled a halved kumquat at the bottom of a glass. He dropped in some ice, then several dried cloves and a couple more kumquats, poured in a few ounces of the Dorothy Parker gin and slid the glass toward me. It was accompanied by a bottle of Schweppes tonic. I was free to use as much or as little as I wanted.

I wanted more (cocktails, I mean). You’ll find a lavender gin and tonic on the menu at Cata. A licorice one, too. Another with cilantro, another with star anise, and another with the aromatic oil from a big orange peel. Each version uses a specific gin. It might be the Botanist or Boodles or Bluecoat or Death’s Door; the tonic might be Fever-Tree, Q, Fentimans, White Rock or Schweppes. In each instance, the team at Cata went through scores of trial runs to suss out the combinations that would give each gin the proper spotlight.

“We wanted to be simple,” said Michel Vasilevich, who oversees beverages for Cata. “Nothing infused. Nothing overpowering. Gin is beautiful on its own already.”

Gin, like sake, pairs effortlessly with salty, fatty bites of food, like tapas. So it only makes sense that the Spanish style of gin and tonic has been cropping up at spots like Cata, Tertulia, Boqueria and La Vara, in Brooklyn, where a “gin-tonic” comes in a big glass that feels like some Iberian goblet with a fragrant curl of lemon peel climbing out.

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A gin and tonic being prepared by Tyler Pitman, the director of operations and national beverage manager for Todd English Enterprises, at the bar at the Todd English Food Hall.Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

If it’s back in fashion now, Spain gets some of the credit, but so does the whole artisanal, D.I.Y. approach to ingredients. Per Se, Thomas Keller’s culinary temple in the Time Warner Center, created something of a stir years back when it started offering a cocktail mixed with cinchona powder, the traditional ingredient used to make tonic water.

Now, kitchen-brewed tonic is a badge of honor at certain places around the country.

Consider Pedro Gonçalves, the man in charge of wine and beverages at Oceana, a Midtown restaurant that prides itself in stocking not only gins from around the world, but four different shades of tonic: sweet, bitter, citrus and spicy. A while back, Mr. Gonçalves, a lover of G&Ts who has family roots in Portugal, found himself wondering: “Why do people have such a great gin, and then ruin it with a generic tonic? It kind of bothered me.”

So, with an eye toward conjuring up his own quinine syrup, he ordered a stash of powdered cinchona bark from Peru. “I was like, ‘O.K., what the hell do I do with this?’ ” he recalled. “Honestly, I didn’t really have any idea.” Filtering out the sediment turned out to be a challenge, but through trial and error, Mr. Gonçalves figured out how to make tonic.

“Quinine has quite a history,” he said. “The native South Americans used to use it as a muscle relaxant. It’s good for you. After a hard day’s work, your body is fatigued.”

Now it’s a matter of persuading customers to give the muscle relaxant a try. The cocktail often looks different with a house-made tonic. Its hue can resemble iced tea. “At first, people were like, ‘Wow, this is kind of dark,’ ” he said. But Mr. Gonçalves remains so convinced that “anything that’s mass-produced is not going to have the same attention to detail” that he uses an odd kind of reverse marketing. Sidle up to the bar at Oceana and he’ll charge you a dollar extra if you ask for Schweppes.

Video

Gin and Tonic, With Kumquat and Clove

The addition of kumquats and cloves puts a satisfying twist on a favorite summer classic.

“That’s their business,” said Tyler Pitman, the director of operations and national beverage manager for Todd English Enterprises. “I’m not going to do it better than they are.” Mr. Pitman put together the recipe for a gin and tonic that’s served at the bar at the Todd English Food Hall, the gastronomic emporium in the Plaza. It’s made with Fever-Tree tonic, Hendrick’s gin, a slice of grapefruit, a sprinkle of freshly grated cardamom and a leaf of basil that’s clapped between two hands to foster the release of flavor.

Mr. Pitman believes that the key to the infrastructure of a good G&T is sticking to the classic recipe, he said.

Indeed, if the cocktail has an equivalent in the American literary canon, it has to be “The Great Gatsby,” the Jazz Age staple by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Both the book and the drink manage to come across as simultaneously elegant and egalitarian, and how you feel about a “reinvented” G&T might just correspond to how you feel about the recent film version of “Gatsby” by Baz Luhrmann, the Australian director who seems to have missed his calling as a designer of vertigo-inducing carnival rides.

In each case, might it be better not to let things get out of hand? The gentleman running the bar at the Greenwich Project, a new spot downtown, would agree. He brushed off the idea of making his own tonic after some failed experiments a few years back. “We attempted it, but we decided against it,” he said the other day, after explaining that a template can be found in “Dr. No,” the Ian Fleming novel, during a scene in which James Bond orders a double with a whole lime. “We were unable to get something that we really loved every single time. And many people who want a gin and tonic just want the classic.” Listen up. There’s an extra reason to believe that the man at the bar at the Greenwich Project knows what he’s talking about. His name, after all, is Scott Fitzgerald.

A version of this article appears in print on May 22, 2013, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Gin, Tonic And a Dash Of Restraint. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe